His adrenaline had stopped racing and the vengeance he sought for whoever hit him with a bottle or microphone or whatever it was that split his head open had long since subsided when Glenn Winston climbed into bed one November night five years ago wondering what in the world he just did.

Winston led a group of Michigan State football players to Rather Hall to look for a fraternity member he said jumped him the night before. A brawl ensued, the specifics of which are still up for debate, and as he made his way back to his Spartan Village apartment, Winston knew his MSU career was over.

He called his then-position coach, current Central Michigan coach Dan Enos, to tell him what happened. Enos told Winston to be at head coach Mark Dantonio’s office first thing the next morning.

Winston spent the next few hours with his head on his pillow and his mind in a swirling state of thought.

I shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have gone to any parties. I should have just chilled, relaxed with my girl. We should have just went and got something to eat, watched Netflix.

By the time he fell asleep, Winston was up again, awaken by a 7:30 a.m. phone call from Michigan State director of player development Dino Folino.

A few days later, Winston was off the football team for good. A couple months after that, he was doing his second six-month stint in Ingham County Jail.

“I knew it was over,” Winston said. “I knew I was going to jail. That probably was the roughest night I ever had, the night the second situation happened.”

Winston, who grew up on the south side of Chicago and moved to the east side of Detroit when he was 12, has had plenty of rough nights in his 25 years, though more recently he’s drawn hope from days like Thursday.

In a dimly lit indoor soccer field at High Velocity Sports in Canton, Winston strapped on a pair of track spikes swirled red and black at the toe — “I like how they look, real freaky,” he said — and ran two 40-yard dashes, jumped a 36.5-inch vertical and went through shuttle and bag drills for no one in particular.

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Winston’s trainer and mentor, Jeffrey Johnson, held a stopwatch at the finish line while one of Johnson’s assistants and a few of Winston’s former Michigan State teammates, Greg Jones and Brandon Denson, helped video the workout to send to NFL teams.

Not a single scout was in attendance. Most teams are busy with draft meetings this week, and none of the other four players at the workout warranted much attention.

But as Winston churned his legs and whirled past bags, his hope that some team will look past his off-field problems, realize he’s a changed man with plenty of talent and give him a chance to win a roster spot was alive and well.

“A mistake doesn’t dictate who I am,” Winston said. “I was young around the time. I was 18, 19, I’m a grown man now. I’m completely past that. I paid my debt.”

After two arrests — he spent six months in jail for a 2008 fight with MSU hockey players and violated his probation with the 2009 Rather Hall incident — Winston is a longshot to get drafted, even though one area scout who spoke to the Free Press on the condition of anonymity said he would have no problem taking the running back late in next week’s draft.

“He’s talented,” the scout said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody takes him and drafts him. Now, he probably won’t because he’s older and he’s had issues, but really, the value in that round, there’s not going to be anybody as big as him or as powerful as him as a running back. There’s going to be a lot of backs picked in the seventh that do not have his talent.”

Winston played parts of two seasons at Michigan State then disappeared from sight before resurfacing and catching scouts’ eyes at Eastern Michigan’s pro day in March.

He played in seven games at MSU, mostly on special teams, as a true freshman, then won the starting running back job as a sophomore after he walked out of jail and onto the practice field the first day of camp.

He made his first career start early in his sophomore season in a 26-20 win over Michigan, and a week later tore the ACL in his right knee in a win at Illinois.

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Winston was dismissed from the program before the year ended, and when he got out of jail he spent a semester at Lansing Community College and living on friends’ couches before moving back to Detroit.

For the better part of a year, Winston tried to restart his football career with no luck. He asked Michigan State to notify every historically black college football program and some other Division I-AA and II schools of his release. He said schools like Alabama State and Tennessee State showed some interest, but ultimately no one was willing to take a chance on his past.

“I felt like if I’d go to an HBCU that would keep me out of trouble, it’d keep me around people that look like me and all that type of stuff. But obviously that didn’t work,” Winston said. “I got a few calls, but I feel like the deans — the people that was ahead of the coaches — wouldn’t want me in the schools. I got a lot of no’s from presidents.”

With his football dreams fading, Winston found refuge wherever he could. Not wanting to be a burden on his mother and two young siblings, and with his father in Illinois state prison serving a 25-year sentence for murder, Winston crashed with buddies from high school and spent more than a few nights sleeping in his old Michigan State teammate Fred Smith’s Impala.

Eventually, Winston and an old high school friend moved into a small home in Detroit that had no running water and no refrigerator, and the two survived on whatever food they could find and the little money they made from working odd jobs landscaping. They shared popcorn for dinner sometimes, or split a 99-cent bag of peanuts and a gallon of orange juice.

Through his girlfriend’s Facebook account, Winston reached out to Denson and told him he was trying to play football again, and Denson put Winston in touch with Johnson, his trainer.

A few weeks after they started working out together — and after seeing the conditions he was living in — Johnson and his wife, Rose, invited Winston to move into their Brownstown Twp., home. Winston has been part of the family ever since, doing dishes, watching cartoons with the kids, even changing the Johnson’s youngest son’s diaper.

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“I don’t want anybody to think that I have to sit here and just Glenn is a ticking time bomb because he’s not,” Johnson said. “He’s not. He’s fine. He went through some things in life like I have, like most of my teammates and most of my friends and everything else, and he’s fine. He’s not a ticking time bomb.”

Winston finally got back into football last fall after enrolling at Northwood as a student in the hopes of eventually transferring to Grand Valley State or another program.

He ran for 717 yards and nine touchdowns in eight games, missed some time with minor injuries, and didn’t draw a lick of attention playing on a bad team. But after leaving school with a year of eligibility remaining, Winston turned enough heads at EMU’s pro day with his NFL-ready body (6-feet-1, 225 pounds) to re-emerge as a prospect.

He said he spent 45 minutes talking to a San Francisco 49ers scout after his EMU workout, and Northwood assistant coach Leonard Haynes said nine or 10 NFL teams have called to investigate Winston’s character, the 49ers, Giants, Texans, Packers and Washington among them.

“I think he’ll get a shot,” Haynes said. “Talking to a few of them, they all believe he will be playing on Sundays.”

Winston, who’s drawn inspiration from watching players like LeGarrette Blount overcome their past to reach the NFL, said he’ll make the most of the opportunity if it comes. Haynes, who tried to recruit Winston coming out of high school, said Winston is mature enough now that he believes that will happen.

“Not many people get this opportunity and I would hope he would grab it and I hope he would cherish it,” Haynes said. “And he’s got to make the best of it, period. He’s got to get it done. For him, there is no second chance, put it that way. This is the third chance. This is the chance he’s got to make it all right and I think he’s got some things to prove with people.”